The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Spot These Personality Traits

[Music] how sensitive are you i can tell you for certain that i am not very sensitive i take criticism pretty well but i know that many people do not here to talk about sensitivity and why people are more sensitive than others is triple board certified neuro and forensic psychologist dr judy hello dr judy thanks for being here thank you what a great topic kyle i'm really really glad to be able to weigh in on this oh this is going to be so good so from the perspective of a neuropsychologist can you define sensitivity well sensitivity has a lot of different meanings and ideas attached to it but i would say that one common way of defining sensitivity is somebody who basically has heightened sensory awareness so they notice things both consciously and unconsciously much more than the average person and sometimes we think about a uh trait called sensory processing sensitivity and this is a temperament or personality trait that in many ways has been discussed in the literature in terms of why certain people react to the social environment around them the way that they do and this is a trait that involves an increased sensitivity of a person's central nervous system and what we call a deeper cognitive processing of physical social and emotional stimuli and oftentimes people who possess this trait they have a tendency to pause to check in when they are in a new situation they don't act they kind of take a long time observing longer than the average person they have a greater sensitivity to subtle stimuli so the slightest head nod from somebody or a change in the decibel of noise that they hear from the other room and also they tend to think really deeply about things that have happened to them the things that have happened to other people and there's a lot of contemplation before employing any coping actions all of this is driven by this heightened reactivity both emotionally and on the sensory side and they do this to both positively and negatively stimuli so in many ways we can think about this as a person who feels emotions a lot more intensely than the average person is it bad to be very sensitive well i don't think that it's bad to be highly sensitive and certainly there also has been this other term that was coined by psychologist elaine aaron and her husband arthur aaron and they called this the highly sensitive person and this construct to what we're talking about it's not a diagnosis it's just a construct that people have discussed there's you know varying levels of research support for this construct and what it means but basically we we see that people who are highly sensitive if we are using this definition of the highly sensitive person according to aaron and aaron they make up about one-fifth or one-fourth of our population so that's a big part of our population of our human population and sometimes people think about it as being related to some negative outcomes but there's also some research that shows that there's positive outcomes like they have heightened empathy and can put themselves in other people's shoes better and they're more responsive to the people around them and that means that they can take care of other people's needs better than the average person and so there's certainly some positive traits that can come along with that but i think some of the negative traits and i think the most prominent one that i see is that because they feel everything so intensely they get burnt out a lot quicker there is such a thing as vicarious trauma and empathy burnout and they're more likely to suffer from that and sometimes they torture themselves with this ambiguous or subtle stimuli that actually doesn't mean anything but then they judge themselves much more harshly and it affects how they can actually interact in the moment using mindfulness and intuition to guide how they interact with other people or in novel situations and so those are some of the potential downfalls of somebody who might be highly sensitive is a highly sensitive person the same thing as an empath it's not quite the same thing as an empath and again we're talking about constructs with different level definitions but somebody who's an empath is somebody who can put themselves in other people's shoes very easily and feel somebody else's emotions they're not necessarily people who might be sensitive to sensory stimuli for example that's not generally the definition we use of an empath but somebody who is a highly sensitive person not only do they have this more emotionally heightened reactivity that causes them sometimes to also exhibit more empathy although i would say that a highly sensitive person could emote more empathy or they just turn all of that heightened emotional reactivity onto themselves so instead of thinking about somebody else's feelings they're constantly thinking about their own feelings and becoming very preoccupied with it and also in addition to somebody with a highly sensitive personality uh construct is somebody who's very sensitive to sensory stimuli a person with an empathic sort of trait isn't necessarily so they may not notice for example that the pitch of a child's voice change in the next room but a person who is highly sensitive they would notice that and that might actually be grading to them they could be very bothered by those sounds and to clarify for our viewer a highly sensitive person is not a diagnosis it's not in the dsm your therapist psychologist psychiatrist is not going to diagnose you as a highly sensitive person like dr judy said these are constructs and i think um they're i've seen a lot of it especially on youtube with these non-diagnosable conditions i guess and they are very popular and part of me is happy that people are finding a community and maybe a label for lack of a better term on what they're experiencing because labels can be good um but on the other hand it's like gosh we have another thing we gotta look at and it's not even in the dsm when we talk about things like quiet borderline personality disorder or highly sensitive people do you think it's helping hurting or having a neutral effect on the overall state of mental health that's a big question but you're dr judy you can handle it you always give me the big questions kyle but i think that that's an important one to tackle because on the one hand we definitely want to steer away from over diagnosing and over pathologizing individuals and so i think if these terms are then thrown around to be used as arsenal when you're mad at somebody or to label somebody you don't like then that's when things are negative but if it's used in the pursuit of self-development and self-understanding and it's more just a way of how we learn to socialize with one another or um how to relate to one another more positively then i think that it can be very helpful and i'll give you a couple of examples of things that are like this so for example the five love languages that has had a huge response in the lay world of people just feeling like this explains why i get along with certain people and why i don't and what my partner likes and what i don't well the five love languages isn't really based on robust research but it really resonates with people and there's a really positive aspect to how to apply that information and so i think that that would be an example of something that may not be a diagnosis of any sort um isn't necessarily supported by robust science and yet there's obviously positive utility in understanding those models and so i think that the highly sensitive person can be utilized similarly when you know somebody um who has identified themselves as a highly sensitive person or because of your own reading you believe that they might be and you change the way that you interact with that person to promote better relationships so that you guys can work together more um so you guys have a stronger friendship or a stronger romantic relationship then i think it's utilized well unfortunately a lot of times people will utilize that as almost an insult i've heard people say well that person is just highly sensitive and they mean it in a really negative way and i think that's when we're not doing ourselves any favors in terms of moving along the discussion that we're always having about reducing stigma about people who struggle with certain types of symptoms or conditions if you are resonating with what dr judy is saying tonight you can learn more about the coping coping mechanisms and how to build more resilience during our live panel where we'll have multiple bed circles psychologists and psychiatrists taking your questions live you can register for that panel using the information below this video or go to medcircle.com slash live i'm very excited for that tonight dr judy are people born sensitive or do they become sensitive well certainly there's uh research that suggests people who have higher sensitivities to sensory stimuli that there is something neurologically or neurobiologically driving that that they emerge with those types of symptoms at a very early age even when they were infants or certainly by the time that they reached toddlerhood and there's also been some overlap of individuals who have this sort of highly sensitive personality style and some overlap with individuals who have been identified as being on the autism spectrum and so that doesn't mean that it's a one-to-one but that there has been some early research that has shown that people who are highly sensitive that there's a higher proportion of them that also sort of register on the autism spectrum even if they don't have the actual disorder or the actual diagnosis uh so i think that there is some research that would suggest that early conditions and certainly neurobiological conditions prenatal conditions postnatal conditions that could be causing in part for a person to develop these highly sensitive traits but i also think that there is something to be said about the environmental contributions and influence as they grow older and the theories are that individuals who generally have had a lot of environmental feedback grew up around a ton of noise that sometimes they actually develop more resiliency and then do not develop into highly sensitive people because they've just kind of been used to a lot of noise in their environment if they grew up more in extremely quiet environment very much sheltered from other environmental noises then let's say at the age of five or eight or ten they move into a city where all of a sudden there's all of these noises that could also potentially be a contributor to somebody emerging into a highly sensitive person because this was never something that they were exposed to when they were young and all of these uh signals and um neural pathways are forming in their brain and so that's just another uh type of contributing factor that has been posited that are more related to the person's environment as they're growing up that is fascinating and i would love to hear how many people resonated with what dr judy just explained i leave leave a comment if it resonated with you and explain what did i think i had the opposite approach i was i'm a mama's boy and i was super sensitive growing up oh my gosh you could barely look at me and i would you know i was just so shy and sensitive and introverted and uh when my mom died when i was 16 that side left and i was exclusively raised by my father and that hardened me up very quickly and i think the resilience i have today and the lack of sensitivity i experience is due to that shift at 16 and then being only raised by my dad later in another session i'll probably want to get some tips on how to develop more sensitivity because i'm certainly on the other side of this conversation what are the potential mental health causes of sensitivity and perhaps explain why each mental health condition could lead to higher sensitivity i think when somebody has generalized anxiety disorder or when they have a severe form of depression that oftentimes it can develop these correlated traits of sensitivity and that's because you're oftentimes thinking more than an average person about how you're being perceived by other people and over time that becomes more of a trait of yours that you're constantly hypersensitive to what's going on around you another potential mental health condition where there could be some correlation with the development of highly sensitive personality traits is ptsd and individuals who struggle with ptsd because of survival they've had to be more hyper vigilant in the environment in the past because they've had trauma happen to them they realize that they have to be more on guard so that they can protect themselves and the people that they love and especially when ptsd hasn't been treated it can also cause some of these highly sensitive personality traits to emerge do you think there is a correlation between highly sensitive people or being highly sensitive and being an introvert or an extrovert in general people who are extroverts tend not to be highly sensitive personalities and the reason is a person who is extroverted is by definition somebody who derives their energy from being around other people and they also very easily direct their energy outwards and when somebody who is uh defining themselves as an introvert they direct their energies inward they tend to be more self-reflective and when they're around a lot of people for too long it actually drains them and so as we talk about these definitions of extrovert versus introvert you can see that there's a lot more correspondence for somebody who's an introvert with a person who is highly sensitive because when highly sensitive individuals are in novel situations with too many people they become exhausted because they're constantly trying to scan the environment for what's going on to try to understand their environment better and you can see how much cognitive energy that can take from somebody who's already highly sensitive well in that way it's very similar to somebody who is an introvert whereas people who are extroverts they tend to love crowds they like to be in loud environments where there's a lot going on and they tend to actually feel good in those environments as opposed to feeling drained by them yes uh self-described introvert been a card-carrying member my entire life where my introverts at med circle has a great series on that topic do not let the word introvert fool you into thinking that we are weak or somehow less than the extroverts that is not the case take a look at this inside look into the series you know our goal is to not get to the point where you're so depressed that you need medication or you know other interventions a couple of other prevention tools are more developmental it's like really having start having conversations about mental health in elementary school oh interesting we don't do that we don't do that i think we're almost scared to bring up those ideas to children like we're going to put ideas in their head kids get sad kids get anxious you know you were diagnosed with depression when you were 9. and if we could have those conversations and help children process their feelings like i'd be willing to give up multiplication tables for this one i think it's more important you got a calculator yeah you made a lot of math teachers go yeah i mean sorry about that because i love math right but if it's all about sort of trading off something here i would i mean something to keep these conversations about health and wellness and emotional vocabularies and how to share feelings and teaching boys in particular that it's okay to talk about your feelings you can watch that entire series and more at watch.medcircle.com as a reminder tonight we'll be having a live panel with our med circle psychologist and psychiatrist come join us will you get your answer your questions answered by these top doctors this is not treatment it is education dr judy thank you for being here it's always wonderful to see you and the green girl it looks awesome thank you i love it i love it i'm kyle kittleson remember whatever you're going through you got this [Music] you

Channel: MedCircle

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Keywords: highly sensitive person, sensitive, personality, personality traits, personality types, introvert, introverts, hsp, empath, highly sensitive people, sensitivity, empathy, psychology, psych2go, mental health, empaths, interpersonal skills, soft skills, personal growth, explainer video, emotional intelligence, life coaching, brainy dose, anxiety, self help, things you should know, relationships, codependency, personal development, borderline personality disorder, medcircle, video, youtube

Id: u6R8peZczXY

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021